What does World of Warcraft do better than Cox?

[Necate]

Did tout think that wow classic will drain pour coh population ?

[Abraxus]

Did tout think that wow classic will drain pour coh population ?

 

It might have an effect, but I doubt we will lose enough players to be concerned with having to consolidate existing shards.  We seem to have a steady influx of new players who are only now becoming aware of the existence of these servers, so while we might see a slight dip when that happens, I don't think it will have any noticeable effect on population.

[TheOtherTed]

Did tout think that wow classic will drain pour coh population ?

 

I'll go one step beyond Abraxus and give that a flat-out "no."  Not because of any fanboyishness (if that wasn't a word, it is now), but it seems unlikely to me that the intersection between CoH fans and classic WoW fans would be very big.  Two very different themes that offer very different experiences - and as has been suggested, the people trickling into CoH now (like myself) are probably doing so to satisfy an itch that classic WoW won't scratch.

 

I might play classic WoW, just for nostalgia, but I know that I'll be fully reminded of the reasons I dropped WoW after three months of BC.

[Thorazine]

Music and environmental ambience.

 

Exactly why I play LOTRO, or played that is, haven't touched it in a month!  :D

[I Chaos Games]

Honestly no idea. I was playing City of Heroes first ... I then gave World of Warcraft a shot and it was just such a step down I didn't go anywhere with it. It felt sooooo much slower paced, and the whole let''s walking 20 minutes so  you can play .... is stupid.

[Heraclea]

WoW taught me to appreciate COH and to see how different it was from other MMOs and their more punishing environments and mandatory min-maxing.  I do not want any generic MMO crap (the ubiquitous 'drop what you're doing and stand over there') in my City.  I do not want tanks or healers to become prima donnas.  I do not want encounters that require live voice chat to coordinate.

[Oubliette_Red]

Marketing, clearly.

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

It has Blizzard, which threw tons of money into marketing.

 

CoH had NCsoft, which threw scraps.

[EggKookoo]

It has Blizzard, which threw tons of money into marketing.

 

To be fair, WoW was built off an already well-loved IP at launch. There was considerable word of mouth power coming from fans of the Warcraft (and Starcraft) RTS games.

[Sunsette]

WoW is leagues better at group combat design, offers a lot of fairly fun minigames, and it's nearly impossible to not understand the plot importance of the missions you're doing. Dungeon designs are far more interesting and varied. WoW is basically better in every way when it comes to content.

 

What CoH offers is a player, rather than content, focused experience. You don't have to struggle to not look like a clown. You have meaningful build differences between players of the same class. Few are the concessions that must be made to composition of the group to succeed at any content. Few are the restrictions made because a specific combination was very efficient at killing in a very specific circumstances.

 

WoW is a game you play to explore the content. I love the aesthetics of Ulduar still, as well as its fights. They reward strong knowledge and fast reflexes, while the story is conveniently disconnected from the worst of WoW writing but had a clearly comprehensible idea.

 

City of Heroes is a game to enjoy how cool my character is. The content is meh; why are we in some weird Hellenistic pastiche? Haven't I seen this cave a dozen times before? Wait, we killed an AV in the middle of that fight?

 

But...

 

I can fly at 40 mph in three dimensions while one-shotting a Nazi with a rocket launcher and dodging shots from robots like a boss in my boss outfit that doesn't mandate overlarge shoulderpads.

[SwitchFade]

I know we're all probably a tiny bit biased but I really can't think of anything (though that might be because I never got far in wow since I never enjoyed it)

So what does WoW do better than CoX?

 

Literally, nothing.

 

Yes, nothing at all, that's why it has subscriber numbers in the millions, while free CoX can't bust 100k...

 

Mm hmm, and people still walk into traffic on their cell phones, obliviously. The world has all kinds of people, bless them. And, to each their own.

 

That doesn't change the fact that the only thing wow does better than CoH... Is be terrible.

[Sunsette]

What is the benefit in dismissing differing viewpoints so casually?

 

CoH and WoW; one of the biggest MMOs ever and the biggest ever, launched in the same year. There's been considerable overlap in the userbase over time.

 

You don't have to like something to acknowledge what a thing does well.

[gtangsk]

I remember playing CoH religiously when WoW came out. Thematic considerations aside (horses for courses but I myself prefer the superhero theme) it was the world that most impressed me with WoW. Whether it's to your taste is something else, but the world just seemed a lot more fleshed out than CoH. I also loved the continuous nature of the world in WoW and the fact that you didn't have to zone. I did gasp a little bit when seeing Ironforge from afar and entering into it seamlessly with no loading screen. Having said that....I don't really play WoW anymore and started losing interest after WoD and here I am still playing CoH  ;) ;).

[Apparition]

User Interface/Experience and Stability.

 

Mods are a big part of the UI/UX,

 

I experienced this as a curse that killed my interest in endgame raiding.  You're always on the clock in WoW.  Raid leaders, and probably everyone else, always knew how much damage or healing you were putting out and how much threat you had generated.  The opposite of fun.  It also means everybody knows immediately who stepped on the wrong square and the other sorts of catherding that sends players into realtime voice chat just to play the game. 

-  pretty much sums up my experience.

 

I might be tempted to go back and dust off that version of Heraclea.  But only if this kind of data gets hidden.

 

Yeah.  I was convinced to try out another medieval fantasy MMOG after CoH died even though I strongly dislike the medieval fantasy genre, and it too encouraged mods that offered DPS and heal checks and such.  Then I PUGed a dungeon at level 20ish.  One of my teammates was around level 60.  After we finished, he lorded over his DPS in comparison to mine.  Congratulations, you're 40 levels higher with much better gear.  After that, I decided I would never play a MMOG that allows mods with DPS and heal checks and such as it just leads to jerkish behavior.

[Apparition]

Yes, nothing at all, that's why it has subscriber numbers in the millions, while free CoX can't bust 100k...

 

Millions eat at McDonald's every day.  That doesn't make it good.

[Hopeling]

Yes, nothing at all, that's why it has subscriber numbers in the millions, while free CoX can't bust 100k...

 

Millions eat at McDonald's every day.  That doesn't make it good.

The question wasn't whether WoW is good, but whether it does anything better than CoH. The fact that the food is bad has nothing to do with how good the company is at, say, supply chain logistics.

 

For example, WoW is vastly better at strategically interesting boss fights. CoH barely began to experiment with rudimentary versions of that towards the end of its life; almost all AVs are what WoW players would call "tank and spank".

 

Maybe you don't WANT a cheap greasy hamburger, er, a strategic boss fight. That is perfectly fine. But whether you want it or not, they're very good at making it.

[Primantis]

User Interface/Experience and Stability.

 

Mods are a big part of the UI/UX,

 

I experienced this as a curse that killed my interest in endgame raiding.  You're always on the clock in WoW.  Raid leaders, and probably everyone else, always knew how much damage or healing you were putting out and how much threat you had generated.  The opposite of fun.  It also means everybody knows immediately who stepped on the wrong square and the other sorts of catherding that sends players into realtime voice chat just to play the game. 

-  pretty much sums up my experience.

 

I might be tempted to go back and dust off that version of Heraclea.  But only if this kind of data gets hidden.

 

 

Hence why the ongoing joke with Classic WoW Endgame was that it was literally "A second job".

 

Such tools were important for seeing who was carrying their weight and who was under performing, or not listening to instructions. They should *not* be used to shame (although they were, sadly), but should ideally be used as a management tool by the raider leaders to instruct and guide raid/guild members who were either under performing or messing up the raid. Generally if you ask a group of people "Who messed this up?" you'll either get no one answering, or random finger pointing with little real evidence. So a log you can look at and see "Yup, it was Thunderbux" is useful to avoid such a scenario.

 

Flip the situation a bit. How would a person feel feel if they were super dedicated to a raid, farmed for days to make sure they and everyone else had the mats they needed. Spent literally all day grinding through the raid to the final bosses. Suddenly, they can't proceed further, because some chap can't listen or is confused and keeps doing something he isn't supposed to be doing. Wiping the raid over and over. Causing all the  preparations to be for naught and wasting the time of 35+ people for hours.

 

Surely some tool to pinpoint who is messing up and why would be useful. Then the leader could personally message them and ask them to do things a bit differently. The issue, like all tools, lies in the abuse of said tool. 

 

 

 

...And this is why I seldom raided. I wanted to have fun. Maxing out my level and getting decent Heroic gear was enough for me.

[Herotu]

  Better lore.

 

I would encourage you to pay more attention to the mission texts. I know the lore can be hard to dig out, so perhaps that visibility is something WoW may have done better, but CoH lore is brilliant.

[Sunsette]

CoX has far better lore as far as the skeleton of the events that happen. WoW lore is kind of a joke when read as an outline.

 

But what Blizzard nails is presentation. You have to stop and think and go "wait, this is actually dumb" and they do a great job of making sure you don't have a lot of headspace to think about anything but how awesome any given moment is.

 

This shouldn't be read as their writing being deceptive or their writers unskilled. At worst, their universe lacks coordination at points. Really, the problem is the inherent nature of an endless treadmill of bigger and bigger threats needed in order to emotionally engage the audience. The story can't end, no matter how much it may make sense to. In this, WoW writing actually shares a close relationship with the comic books it's clear their writers are intimately familiar with. The canon is best treated as a suggestion if you get too far back from the present; stay invested in the current storyline because you enjoy the characters starring in it.

 

And in the face of that problem, WoW manages to make the end of every dungeon land with an emotional impact.

 

I would rather roleplay in City's world any day. But there are a lot of storylines in this game that are pretty forgettable.

[Xaeon]

I mean, from what I've heard, Battle for Azeroth is basically the point of no return for WoW and the fandom currently absolutely hates Blizzard. I wouldn't say that "Don't you guys have phones?" Blizzard is anything like Peak WOW Blizzard and player confidence in Blizzard being able to turn things around is very low.

 

Estimates by decently reliable methods have suggested that WoW has declined to about Launch numbers of subscribers:

and based on the current trend of irreversible decline I'd expect Activision to take Blizzard behind the shed sometime in the 2020s so Bobby "Has Devil Horns" Kotick can suck out what life there is left from the decaying zombie of the company.

[Sunsette]

BfA is straight up terrible, and there are a number of reasons I don't foresee a return to Azeroth in my cards anytime soon. However, virtually all of WoW's strengths at its apex are shared by Final Fantasy 14, and much of the commentary here is relevant to it as well. I'm not responding to this topic as if it were asking "why should you play WoW right this instant" so much as a general inquiry regarding the appeal of the EQ/DIKU MMO lineage.

[Xaeon]

With WoW seeming to halve its subscriber base with every new expansion, Overwatch losing steam, Heroes of the Storm already dead, Starcraft 2 a decayed wight of a game, and Diablo fans having nothing but scorn for Blizzard after Blizzcon 2018 I'm actually kind of worried about Blizzard's future in the 2020s. I'm kind of expecting the day that Activision ends up doing to Blizzard what EA does to every studio it buys.

[Sunsette]

Perhaps surprisingly given that I've been explaining what I think WoW does right as well as i can muster, emotionally I have little but contempt for Blizzard, and will probably just laugh if that happens.

 

There's only one Blizzard game that I have loved without qualification and the rest is a lot of eye rolls from me. So... meh!

[EggKookoo]

This shouldn't be read as their writing being deceptive or their writers unskilled. At worst, their universe lacks coordination at points. Really, the problem is the inherent nature of an endless treadmill of bigger and bigger threats needed in order to emotionally engage the audience. The story can't end, no matter how much it may make sense to. In this, WoW writing actually shares a close relationship with the comic books it's clear their writers are intimately familiar with. The canon is best treated as a suggestion if you get too far back from the present; stay invested in the current storyline because you enjoy the characters starring in it.

 

Also possibly WoW's lore is wonky as it started out as a Warhammer expy back in the RTS days. Supposedly Warcraft 1 was built around them having the Warhammer license, and they just filed off the serial numbers when the deal died or never actually materialized or whatever. Warcraft's lore in the years since was all generally a ripoff of any number of things, up until WoW came along. At that point they tried cleaning it up and making it something of their own, but it will always have a that mishmash feel.

 

Having said that, yeah, people generally don't play these games because of the lore (at least I don't). The lore enhances the experience and gives players a foundation to appreciate the setting. But at least I know WoW's lore (to some degree and up until I stopped playing regularly about 7-8 years ago). CoH's lore may be fascinating but I have trouble absorbing it.

 

Combat is an interesting one. I find CoH's combat way more fun on an individual level. And most WoW bosses ten years ago were tank & spank. I imagine if Paragon Studios had successfully bought the IP from NCSoft, CoH would have evolved just as much, and we'd be seeing complex tactical AV fights.

 

What WoW really does better is make the game not feel like you're just cycling through the same content structure over and over as you level. CoH suffers from that -- we could use more missions that involve something other than "work your way through an instanced setting, taking out everyone you see." Like perhaps a mission where you're trying to collect salvage for someone. Or even just some surprises here and there, like if you're going through a 5th Col cave base, instead of the steady drip of minions and lieutenants, provide some contrast with a someone more powerful, or maybe even a mini-quest within the mission where you find a friendly NPC who needs your help to do something.

[Sunsette]

I think that's very well put, EggKookoo. I'd quibble with one point there, and expand on another. (The quibble: ten years ago, WoW was in the Lich King expansion; we were past the era of tank and spank in raids by the end of Vanilla, and in dungeons by the end of BC.)

 

Expansion: No one goes to World of Warcraft saying "I'm playing for the lore." Granted, I don't think anyone goes to any MMO for that reason. (SWtOR, once. No one's ever going to repeat that.) But it's a great way to keep players. I was never a constant player of CoX in live, and it was because I frequently found myself going "this is repetitive and meaningless." You're absolutely right about the way WoW uses the content to shape the narrative and also vary it. What keeps me in Homecoming is all the QoL features now that we're not implicitly being strung along on a subscription; I can cut past the grind to get to what I like, but not so quickly it feels meaningless to me.

 

WoW shoved every bit of this well-crafted content in service of raiding. When the content wasn't in raiding, it was meant to try to convince you that raids were a good thing, somehow, even if that part was five steps removed from the front door of the activity you started doing, be that tradeskills or pet battles. (I mentioned that 'contempt' for Blizzard a few posts above? Yeah, this is where it gets into play.) Many developers were hired away from raiding guilds in Everquest and asked to make their vision of a better game. And what did those guys like?

 

Raiding.

 

Hooboy, did they ever love raiding.

 

When WoW hit, it was big news in the MMO community, and it was big news because of the combination of a relatively major license and the fact that it was an MMO that was easily accessible and presented a lot of illusion of choice and character value. Look how granularly your character can be mechanically customized! Look at how lively the background NPCs are. You get rewarded XP for -EXPLORATION?- WoW really felt like: play your own way.

 

And these devs looked at it, and they looked at their subscriber numbers, and they were happy. But they weren't happy about one thing -- one big thing.

 

Raiding engagement. Less than 1% of players ever set foot in Naxxramas 40. As people got higher up into raiding, they found raiding went from a social activity you did with your friends to a job. Decurse this immediately; avoid the fire; keep up max DPS; don't let this buff expire. Oh, you did any of those things? Various mods will helpful let the whole raid know who to blame. Guess you're not going to be awarded the loot. So people said: hey, this isn't for me.

 

Which, really, fine. Not every part of a big game has to be for me. I had a lot of friends who legitimately enjoyed the social environments of raiding in the early days of WoW, I didn't, and that was OK! There was a lot else the game had to offer me.

 

But these raid devs, they loved raiding. I mean, I guess that's what happens when you literally hire guys because they were so good at playing a certain type of gameplay. They make more of that gameplay. They fixed a lot of the things cutting people out of raiding in Burning Crusade.

 

Yet, a problem persisted. I don't believe they ever released hard numbers for this period, but I'd guess anywhere from 10 to 30% of the active population ever seriously raided in Burning Crusade. Whatever it was, the engagement was too low and not to their liking. They wanted more people raiding. So they made more changes. They started tying five-man dungeons to the raid dungeon plot. More and more prominent questlines that began innocuously had to finish in a high level raid. People wanted to finish the stories they began, but they didn't want to raid.So Blizzard simultaneously loosened up more restrictions on raiding -- disquieting the people who actually enjoyed the model -- while forcing more and more of their game to essentially revolve around the endgame raid. Here's a lot of free, good gear: please go raid with it. This talent is cool, but isn't allowed to work in PvP worth a damn; please try it in a raid. This story is continued in a raid. This pet is locked in raid. This mount is locked in a raid. Etc. Etc. Etc.

 

Character builds became meaningless; it's not that the 31 point talent system was ever good in a meaningful sense, but it presented the illusion that your character was unique and belonged to you. Soon, the only thing that differentiated two characters of the same class was a 5 second cast time to respec and the amount of DPS/HPS/TPS & Mitigation they could output with their current gear. All of this had to happen in order to make raiding as accessible as possible, without ever stopping to consider the idea that maybe ... a lot of people just didn't want to raid under any circumstances. They didn't consider that those other features, those other convenience features, should have been treated with as much respect and love as raiding did, rather than relegated to being a gateway drug to convince people to do raids.

 

No, the only feature that ever got anywhere near the amount of respect that raiding did was PvP, and while I have some very fond memories of battleground PvP, I was never competitive enough for arenas, and cross-server battlegrounds added convenience at the cost of server community -- turning PvP into one more toxic, high stress, interchangeable grind.

 

I think what we're seeing now is the draw-down; people who were led by carrot and stick (often the lore they had grown invested in) through content they never really wanted to do to begin with have finally just gotten tired of it. There's nothing effectively hiding the illusion anymore that everything in the game is a speedbump before the raid that the EQ devs and their handpicked successors have always imagined at the heart of WoW. So they jump ship to other games that provide respect to those other qualities, or at least a better illusion of respect than WoW.

 

Can WoW recover? I think it can. The Warcraft name still has a lot of power and respect. I have enough good memories that it's not inconceivable a better expansion could bring me back; Legion managed to get my attention for a little while.

 

Will WoW recover? Well, only time will tell. I think at this point they need leadership that isn't coming from a highly WoW background, has instead played other games in-depth, and goes "okay, here's the button we need to press to fix this." That's essentially how FF14 came out of nowhere from a joke to the current juggernaut of MMOs, and I don't think anyone saw that coming either.

[EggKookoo]

(The quibble: ten years ago, WoW was in the Lich King expansion; we were past the era of tank and spank in raids by the end of Vanilla, and in dungeons by the end of BC.)

 

ten years ago, WoW was in the Lich King expansion

 

ten years ago

 

 

I'll snip the rest for brevity. I don't disagree with any of this, and my experience with WoW jives. I jumped in not too long before HC went live to play a free 1-20 character, and I was surprised at how much it felt like they were just rushing me through the leveling process. My brother, who still plays WoW to this day, agrees that it's all about the endgame. Low level quests are buggy, and he's like "Yeah, been like that for years. Killing gnolls in Redridge isn't the 'real' game. Just wait until you get to max level. Oh, I can boost you, if you want..." Weirdly, for a game with so many levels to get through, 99% of them are just filler.

 

But this thread isn't about bashing WoW. It's about what WoW does better. I'd say another thing it does, well, well, is that it emphasizes content that's in the shared player space. WoW has instances but they're the exception. Typically if you're doing quest X in area Y, you can see other people doing the same thing. It hurts verisimilitude -- I mean, why are these gnolls a threat to the town if every freakin' adventurer and their cousin are hunting them? They should have gone extinct, or at least packed up and moved on. WoW tries to manage this somewhat with phasing, but it's never really convincing.

 

But this isn't a dig at WoW. Despite immersion issues, I think it creates a stronger sense of it being a group game. Aside from some low level stuff, you don't often see teams of players in CoH running around street-sweeping. Almost everyone you see is running to a contact or a door mission. Or hanging out by a vendor. The sheer fun of us all working together to fight evil (or do evil in the case of CoV) is missing. Yeah, I know we can team up pretty easily, and that's great, but sometimes it's too goal-oriented for my mood. I mean, one of the best things that I did in WoW was the WotLK zombie invasion, because it was something anyone could participate in without needing to form a team.